Open Beta
This leads to the ultimate goal for us, open beta. No more alpha codes. Truly algos for all.
It was a very tough journey, but as a start-up you don't have much of a choice. We only raised $3.5M over the 3 years we have been in business, so we couldn't just scale and wait for users to come. We would have run out of money.
Our core engineering team was for the past year, 4 experienced guys with 10 YOE. I (
@davidyjeong), despite everything else I do, am still a core engineer. I was the only one in Asia, so I would monitor production when the other guys in NA were sleeping. We all own a certain aspect of the application. We all take responsibility. We have the experience to answer the questions that came up.
Pretty much everything is on auto-scaling infrastructure now. We even went and optimized our database queries/indicies, working our way down from the least efficient until we had no more optimizations we can make.
Open beta will come in the next couple days. Maybe we find a few more bottlenecks, but we can do no downtime deployments, we have the dashboards, we've grown and we are ready.